Public attention has been focused recently on two major political issues: the Northern political talks, now happily on course again; and within this State, issues related to allegations of financial misbehaviour by politicians.
As the Flood tribunal on allegations of planning corruption started its work, the right of the Moriarty tribunal to investigate financial contributions to politicians was challenged by counsel for Charles Haughey and his family, while the Irish Intercontinental Bank simultaneously challenged the right of an official, appointed by the Tanaiste and Minister for Enterprise and Employment, to investigate the role of the Ansbacher accounts in the financing of Ciaran Haughey's Celtic Helicopters.
This week there has also been an increasingly insistent media and political demand for a reversal of the Government's decision to exclude from the Moriarty tribunal's terms of reference a specific proposal for the identification of the Ansbacher account-holders. This demand culminated in a joint Opposition motion on Thursday to extend the tribunal's terms of reference.
The gravity of this omission from the original terms of reference may be judged by the unprecedented disclosure to the press that lawyers involved in the McCracken tribunal were astounded that the trail they had blazed regarding these accounts had been abandoned.
The reasons given publicly for this decision are unconvincing, and it is profoundly disturbing to hear suggestions that some journalists have been privately advised that disclosure of these names would have a disastrous effect on the economy's financial sector.
It is, of course, possible that over-cautious officials may have briefed politicians to this effect. If so, politicians should have taken such briefings with a lot of salt.
It is the job of politicians to have a wider view than might be expected of officials. And I would have thought that such a wider view would have led Government politicians to realise that the long-term economic damage caused by appearing to be concerned to suppress such facts would exceed any short-term damage that might arise from these facts becoming known. In any event, it simply does not seem credible that our financial economy could be as vulnerable as this to individual malpractices.
This is surely a case where the chips must be allowed to fall where they may. Apart from anything else, politicians' own reputations are being gratuitously damaged. The false belief generated among an increasingly cynical media and public, that this issue is being avoided to protect rich friends, guarantees this.
Political parties should have enough instinct for self-preservation to kill these damaging rumours by being seen to facilitate, rather than block, full exposure of anyone who may have used these accounts for large-scale tax-evasion.
It is especially disturbing that the coincidence of these inquiries and the scale of the publicity they have been attracting should have created an impression in the public mind that corruption of one kind or another is a common feature of Irish politics. This is simply not true.
What can, perhaps, be legitimately said is that as the decades have passed this problem seems to have grown from nothing to something. And, small though its scale may still be, I am not alone in having found extremely worrying the feeling that financial malpractices have been tending increasingly to creep into the political system.
Like many others in political parties, I have found it deeply frustrating that until very recently there has been no outlet for this concern. For years it was indeed the case that, in the absence of any concrete evidence that such a problem existed, even to hint that one suspected something might be wrong was to invite abuse and/or incredulity, the latter sometimes skilfully simulated.
Perhaps the cleverest, and certainly the most infuriating, way in which the raising of this or any other moral issue in politics can be deflected has been to stigmatise anyone who raises the issue as "taking a high moral tone". Perversely, that particular accusation seemed to become more damaging politically than an actual accusation of misbehaviour.
And the fact that public opinion was skilfully led to tolerate and accept this reversal of values has itself been deeply worrying for anyone seriously interested in the good of our society.
Whatever damage recent revelations may have done in the short term to the reputation of politics and politicians, in a longer view this will, I believe, be more than outweighed by the advantages accruing from this issue being fully brought out into the open.
Several distinct issues are involved here. First, there is the problem of the possible impact on political decisions of business contributions to political parties. There is no justification for the cynical belief, now unhappily widespread, that business contributions to parties have all been self-interested, designed at best to influence party's policies in favour of business generally, and at worst to buy specific favours for the donor companies.
Although I know that many will now refuse to believe this, I know from personal experience that the vast bulk of such contributions, given to parties more or less in proportion to their Dail strength, have been provided without hope or expectation of benefit, general or specific, and have been made out of a sense of a general duty to support the democratic system.
But although everything I saw and heard as a politician, and as a party leader, confirmed me in this belief about the general run of such contributions, I was nevertheless eventually forced to conclude that this system should be replaced by taxpayer-financed contributions to the political parties, however unenthusiastic taxpayers might be about such a prospect. There are three reasons for this.
First, there seemed to be reason to believe that a small but perhaps increasing minority of business people were beginning to expect some private benefit from such contributions.
Second, it was becoming evident that an increasingly cynical public opinion was no longer prepared to accept the positive motivation of the vast bulk of business contributors.
And, finally, the substantially increased level of party expenditure, and the consequent greater dependence of parties on corporate rather than individual contributions, have seemed to me to carry an increasing risk that even the most honest and well-intentioned politicians could subconsciously, without realising it was happening, become influenced to avoid implementing policies to which, despite their intrinsic merits, businessmen might be opposed.
That is why six years ago, when I was an Opposition backbencher, I proposed to the Fine Gael front bench a limitation of personal and corporate contributions to parties, and the substitution of State financing. With some minor amendments, this proposal was immediately accepted by the party's front bench and published, and a variant of my proposal was then strongly pushed by Labour when in coalition with Fianna Fail and then implemented by legislation introduced by the rainbow coalition.
Happily, Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrats plans to overturn part or all of the State funding process thus enacted have recently been abandoned, apparently because these parties could not secure sufficient support from Independent deputies to effect such a repeal. In the light of the adverse publicity that has recently attended business funding of political parties it is not entirely clear why Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats were so keen to revert to the former corporate funding system.
Even if they believed they would do somewhat better out of business funding than would their opponents, Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left, by rescinding the provision for State funding they would have left themselves open to damaging accusations.
Apart from the problems and dangers that can arise from business funding of parties, another area of possible corruption could be the acceptance by individual politicians of personal financial payments in return for decisions benefiting the donors.
Such corruption could occur at several different levels - officials, ministers or local politicians - although it could affect only that relatively small range of decisions that are discretionary in character and are taken by one person, or by a small number of persons, and could arise only where the paying party might benefit very substantially from such a decision.
But corruption could also arise where an official has a discretionary power in relation to a matter such as a planning decision that could benefit substantially an individual property owner or developer. Alternatively, because local government legislative decisions, on planning matters for example, are influenced and sometimes even taken by relatively small numbers of councillors, it could happen at the level of local councils.
For many years, there have been rumours and suspicions on each of the above counts. But a combination of several factors - the powerful resistance of public opinion to the airing of such suspicions in the absence of hard evidence, our stringent libel laws, and in the past a dearth of investigative journalism, together with a disturbing element of fear - has until recently combined to minimise the publicity given to this issue.
While most politicians would never seek to benefit illegitimately from their political role, and while most businessmen would never contemplate seeking to bribe a politician or an official, among both politicians and businessmen there is a belief that a few of their colleagues may no longer be prepared to maintain this excellent tradition.